Confinement in Paul Auster's Moon Palace and the New York Trilogy

Blank spaces

After his early failures in depicting things to Effing, little by little, Marco learns how to simplify his discourse and he eventually finds out some kind of a method which reveals to convey the essence of things efficiently:

I discovered that the more air I left around a thing, the happier the results, for that allowed Effing to do the crucial work on his own: to construct an image on the basis of a few hints, to feel his own mind travelling around the thing I was describing for him.^218(*)

This technique that Marco puts into practice with Effing comprises the essentials of Auster's conception of `effective' language. Indeed, Auster himself relies on this very technique for the writing of his novels. This stems from a genre which has had a particular influence on his work, that of fairy tales.

In the end, though, I would say that the greatest influence on my work has been fairy tales (...) these are bare-bones narratives, narratives largely devoid of details, yet enormous amounts of information are communicated in a very short space, with very few words. What fairy tales prove, I think, is that it's the reader (...) who actually tells the story to himself. The text is no more than a springboard for the imagination. `Once upon a time there was a girl who lived with her mother in a house at the edge of a large wood.' You don't know what the girl looks like, you don't know what color the house is, you don't know if the mother is tall or short, fat or thin, you know next to nothing. But the mind won't allow these things to remain blank; it fills in the details itself, it creates images based on its own memories and experiences -which is why these stories resonate so deeply inside us. The listener becomes an active participant in the story.^219(*)

Therefore, Marco's technique to describe the world to Effing rests upon the same principle as Auster's writing: to let the listener / reader fill in the blanks with his imagination, to let him appropriate the story so that in the end, it is he who actually creates his own story: «The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe that it's the reader who writes the book and not the writer.»^220(*) Thus, leaving blanks, in the style of fairy tales, is a solution to the issue of the conveying of the essence of things. However, between the blanks, there has to be words and all the difficulty lies in the selection of these words. For this task, another literary genre has to be requisite, that of poetry. Indeed, the descriptive accounts that Marco eventually gives to Effing are poetry no more, no less, i.e. a highly thought-of selection of words, each of them being chosen for its particular evocative power. Besides, Pavel Shum -Effing's former companion- is depicted as «a master of the poetic phrase»^221(*) So, when Effing says to Marco: «Dammit, boy, (...) use the eyes in your head! I can't see a bloody thing, and here you're spouting drivel about `your average lamppost' and `perfectly ordinary manhole covers'.»^222(*) He wants him to poetize his discourse, to see the world not with the eye of an `ordinary' man, but with that of a poet. In fact, he requires him to have the same approach to the world and language as the poet. For, as Auster writes about Charles Reznikoff: « [the poet] must learn to speak from his eye -and cure himself of seeing with his mouth.»^223(*)

* ²¹⁸ Moon Palace, page 123.

* ²¹⁹ Interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory in The Art of Hunger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), page 304.

* ²²⁰ Interview with Joseph Mallia in The Art of Hunger, page 272.

* ²²¹ Moon Palace, page 121.

* ²²² Moon Palace, page 120.

* ²²³ The Decisive Moment, in The Art of Hunger, page 35.